This Book Will Bury Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, rape, child sexual abuse, racism, gender discrimination, ableism, child abuse, animal cruelty and death, mental illness, disordered eating, addiction, and substance use.

Jane is the novel’s narrator and protagonist. An intelligent but insecure young woman, she introduces herself through the framework of her anxiety and social isolation. She does not relate to her fellow students and has few friends at college. It is these qualities that make the true-crime group so attractive to Jane: The group “become[s] [her] safe space” and her first real experience of friendship and social cohesion (41). She is willing to devote an increasing amount of time to cases in part because she enjoys video chatting with her fellow investigators on Signal. Grief also draws Jane to the world of amateur sleuthing. Her father’s death at the beginning of the novel plunges her into a state of deep depression. She cannot make sense of his death and throws herself into sleuthing in part because it provides her with answers. She cannot get to the bottom of her father’s death, but solving crimes helps her feel that she is imposing order on chaotic narratives and explaining the unexplainable.